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WASHINGTON—Troy Newman, a leader in the U.S. pro-life movement, sounded triumphant. The undercover video of a top Planned Parenthood official talking about putting a price on fetal organs, he said, is as damning as a recording of “the Mafia talking about knocking somebody off.”

“We caught ’em,” Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said over the phone Wednesday. “Talking about what they do, over lunch, in a cavalier, casual fashion. This is the real Planned Parenthood.”

He added: “I think it hit a nerve.”

Of that, at least, there is no doubt. The video has outraged anti-abortion Americans, triggered investigations in Washington and around the country, and threatened federal funding to Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion health services.

It’s an undeniable victory for Newman’s side, even though the video includes no smoking gun and may show nothing nefarious at all. Planned Parenthood says it is the victim of a deceitful “smear campaign,” its senior official guilty of nothing more than talking about tissue donation in an insensitive tone.

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Republican presidential candidate and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal launched a probe into Planned Parenthood chapters in his state after a contentious video about the group was recently released. (Nati Harnik / AP)

What the video shows:

Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s national senior director of medical services, eats a salad and drinks wine with two people she believes are representing a company looking to obtain fetal tissue donated by abortion patients. In fact, they are anti-abortion activists from a group called the Center for Medical Progress.

When the activists press Nucatola on how much each specimen costs, she says $30 to $100. She then breezily discusses how abortion providers try to avoid crushing the parts of the fetus they know are wanted for research.

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lungs, liver, because we know that. So we’re not going to crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above,” she says.

How the video might mislead:

The nine-minute video intersperses Nucatola’s comments with the text of the federal law banning the trafficking of fetal body parts for a profit. The implication: Planned Parenthood is committing a crime. Newman, who sits on the board of the Center for Medical Progress, called Wednesday for the prosecution and imprisonment of Planned Parenthood’s “criminals.”

But in the unedited video, nearly three hours long, Nucatola says more than once that Planned Parenthood centres are not making a profit on the tissue; they charge a fee, she said, only to recoup the costs of making each donation.

“Offsetting their costs,” one of the activists says. “Right,” Nucatola responds. “No one’s going to see this as a money-making thing.”

Newman argued that donations do not cost any money and that even a small fee amounts to a profit and a crime. The law, though, allows “reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.”

Why it’s effective regardless:

The video plays into long-held suspicions of the financial motivations of abortion providers, said Mary Ziegler, a Florida State law professor and the author of a Roe vs. Wadenew book on the abortion wars after Roe vs. Wade. And it drags the debate to the specifics of how abortions are conducted and how fetal remains are treated — the preferred terrain of pro-lifers.

“That’s something that can even make people uncomfortable who want abortion to be legal,” Ziegler said. “It’s not a great issue if you’re pro-choice. Because it’s kind of all of the areas that the pro-life movement has made the most progress on in terms of shaping public opinion.”

The political fallout:

Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to issue denunciations. One, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, launched an investigation of the Planned Parenthood chapters in his state. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has introduced legislation to deny Planned Parenthood federal funding, which amounts to more than $100 million (U.S.) annually, none of which goes to abortion.

What’s next:

The Center for Medical Progress released a new undercover video Tuesday of another Planned Parenthood official discussing the same topic. Newman said there are more disclosures coming.

“There’s a ton of information that we could potentially drop,” he said. “We have videos and documents that prove that Planned Parenthood is lying.”

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